Tenderness: the life-blood of love

The paths that connect the heart of a man to the heart of a woman are mysterious. Equally mysterious are the paths between the hearts of two men and similarly between the hearts of two women who find each other and declare their mutual love. From those connections is born the falling in love, love; and finally marriage or permanent union. Since we deal with liberties, the couples are exposed to imponderable events.

Existence itself is never established once and for always. It exists in permanent dialogue with the environment. That exchange leaves no one immune. Everyone lives exposed. Mutual loyalties are tested. In a marriage, passion is followed by daily life with its dull routine. In their lives together the two experience separations, volcanic passions erupt with fascination for another person. It is not uncommon that the ecstasy is followed by deception. There are twists, forgiveness, renewal of promises and reconciliation. But the wounds always remain, such that even when healed, scars remain as a reminder that once they bled.

Love is a living flame that burns, but that can diminish and slowly be covered with ashes, until it is extinguished. It is not that the persons come to hate each other, rather, they become indifferent to each other.  That is the death of love. The 11th verse of the Spiritual Canticle of the mystic Saint John of the Cross, which are songs of love between the soul and God, says with acute observation: «the pain of love is only healed with presence and closeness». Platonic, virtual love, or love at a distance are not enough. Love demands presence. Love needs the concrete closeness that, more than just the physical, is the face-to-face, and the heart feeling the throb of the heart of the other.

The mystic poet puts it well: love is an ache that, in my words, is only cured with what I would call essential tenderness. Tenderness is the life-blood of love. If you want to guard, fortify, and give sustainability to love, be tender with your companion. Without the balm of tenderness the sacred flame of love is not nourished.  It burns out.

What is tenderness? To begin with, let us set aside psychological and superficial concepts that identify tenderness as a mere emotion and the excitement of feeling the other’s presence. To concentrate only on feelings creates sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is a product of insufficiently integrated subjectivity. It bends in on itself and celebrates the sensations provoked by the other. It does not reach beyond itself.

Tenderness, by contrast, arises when one is not centered only in oneself, but reaches out in the direction of the other, feeling the other as other, participating in the existence of the other, and allowing oneself be touched by the history of the other’s life. The other marks the subject, by its lingering in the other, not for the sensations that it evokes in one, but for love, for the appreciation of the other and the value of that person’s life and struggle. “I love you not because you are beautiful; you are beautiful because I love you”.

Tenderness is the affection we give to others for themselves. Tenderness is caring without obsession. Tenderness is neither effeminacy nor renouncing of rigor. It is an affection that, in its own way, opens us to the knowledge of the other.  Speaking with the bishops in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Francis asked them for “the revolution of tenderness,” as a condition for a true pastoral encounter.

In reality we only know each other well when we have affection and feel involved with the person with whom we want to establish communion. Tenderness can and should coexist with extreme undertakings for a cause, as was truly exemplified by the absolute revolutionist Ernesto Che Guevara (1928-1968). We hold dear his inspiring sentence: “we must be hardened but without losing tenderness” . Tenderness includes the creativity and self-realization of the person next to us and through the person we love.

A relationship of tenderness does not involve anguish, because it is free from the search for advantage and domination. Tenderness is the heart’s own strength, it is the profound desire to share paths. The anguish of the other is my anguish, their success is my success and their salvation or perdition is my salvation and, in deep down, not only mine but of all.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662),  XVII century French philosopher and mathematician, made an important distinction that helps us understand tenderness: he distinguished the esprit de finesse from the esprit de géometrie. The esprit de finesse is the spirit of purity, of sensibility, of caring and of tenderness. The spirit does not only think and reason. The spirit goes beyond: to reason it adds sensibility, intuition and the capacity of feeling in depth.  From the spirit of purity is born the world of excellencies, of the great dreams, of the values and commitments to which it is worth dedicating one’s time and energy.

The esprit de géometrie is the spirit of calculus and work, interested in efficacy and power. But where power is concentrated there is neither tenderness nor love. This is why authoritarian persons are hard and without tenderness and, sometimes, without pity.  But this is the mode of being that has dominated all modernity. It has cornered, and placed under great suspicion, all that is related to affection and tenderness.

From here also comes the terrifying vacuum of our “geometric” culture, with its plethora of sensations but without deep experiences; with fantastic accumulation of knowledge but with scant wisdom, with too much muscular vigor, too much sexualizing, too many artifacts of destruction, as shown by the serial killers, but without tenderness or the caring for one another, for the Earth, and her sons and daughters, for the common future of all.

Love and life are fragile. Their invincible strength comes from the tenderness with which we envelope and nourish them forever.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU